Hibe History

Many people ask me “What is the story behind Hibe?”. Being a Hibe advocate, I have a ready-to-eat answer to that question but I rarely take (or have) the time to provide an in-depth answer.  This post aims to do just that.

Discovering Hibe

In 2007, Shopmedia, an e-commerce company, was developing tools for online auctions and virtual sellers.  It anchored its vision in how we do shopping in life and one of its projects involved creating a community using products as a mean to socialize.  By 2008, founder Jean Dobey felt that the community idea did not fully reflect real life experiences.  After all, product relations represent only a fraction of our social life.

We asked ourselves how to leverage our technology to provide a social network mapped on real human behaviors.  We certainly did not want to see our emotions, thoughts, nuances, and interests all mashed up in walls, lists and feeds.   We needed more, much more.

To get what we wanted, we worked on our social engine until we nailed down the concepts and the technology that really allowed a user to extend his real interactions online, thus creating Hibe.

History goes

Due to its unique approach, Hibe became a Virtual Artifacts project in 2009.  Our goal became to create a social platform where we, as users, would gladly share our life, a platform where we control how others see us and interact with us. This is even more important in light of the privacy issues of the last few years.  Later that year, we released a prototype closed to the public.  A few months afterward, we opened up Hibe version 0.1 to everyone.

As of May 2010, we updated the live site to remove the Fallen Hamster messages.  The site serves to display the Hibe concepts but lacks functionality.  The 0.x releases enabled the development team to capture everyone’s feedback and to better prepare for the shortly coming Version 1.

In short, we found the way to preserve what privacy theorist Helen Nissenbaum calls the integrity of our social contexts.

In the next post, we will explore how Hibe changes the world.  Until then you can follow us on Twitter.